Stealing the land...

“We are here to stay, forever.” Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu vows to keep settlements.

And Donald Trump seems fine with it.

Updated by Sarah Wildman

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told an audience of Jewish settlers that he has no intention of dismantling Israeli settlements in the West Bank in exchange for peace with the Palestinians.

“We are here to stay, forever,” Netanyahu said Monday night in Barkan, a settlement of about 1,500 people, at an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of Israel’s West Bank presence.

"There will be no more uprooting of settlements in the land of Israel,” he vowed. “We are guarding Samaria against those who want to uproot us."

The key word in that sentence is "Samaria." It’s the biblical term for part of the region most of the international community refers to as the West Bank. It’s also an area of land much of the international community believes to be illegally occupied by Israel.

Netanyahu’s comments run counter to decades of stated US policy calling for some settlements to be evacuated as part of a peace deal with the Palestinians. Under previous US administrations, Netanyahu would have been rebuked.

By contrast, a Trump administration spokesperson, speaking on condition of anonymity, said only, “It is no secret what each side's position is on this issue.” And that makes sense, because it is Trump’s own comments on the Middle East, and his skepticism about the need for a two-state solution, that may have led Netanyahu to believe he could speak and act with impunity.

The UN, the European Union, the United States, and even other Israeli leaders from across its political spectrum, have long backed a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

That sort of deal would lead to the creation of a Palestinian state, something that could only happen if Israel ceded some of the land it has occupied in the West Bank since the 1967 Six-Day War to the Palestinians. Some Israeli settlements would, by definition, need to be uprooted along the way. The Israeli population of the West Bank is estimated to range between 450,000 and 500,000.

But that sort of deal has never been Trump’s priority. And that means Netanyahu doesn’t have to say that it’s his, either.

Trump has mulled dumping the two-state solution for months

Trump came into office signaling he was willing to buck all diplomatic conventional wisdom on Israel, the West Bank, and settlements. His diplomatic envoy to the region, Jason Greenblatt, told Israeli Army radio back in November that “it is certainly not Mr. Trump’s view that settlement activities should be condemned and that it is an obstacle for peace, because it is not an obstacle for peace.”

And in February, at a press conference with Netanyahu, Trump himself seemed to question decades of established US diplomatic efforts. “I’m looking at a two state and one state,” he said at the time, “and I like the one that both parties like.”

Both sides widely interpreted the comment as a break from years of American support for a two-state solution.

Last Friday, the State Department doubled down on that ambivalence. “We are not going to state what the outcome has to be,” Heather Nauert, a spokesperson, said, speaking of the administration’s move to restart peace talks by sending Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and a team of negotiators to the region.

"It has to be workable to both sides,” Nauert continued. “That’s the best view as to not really bias one side over the other, to make sure that they can work through it.”

For many critics of the administration, a US refusal to “bias” an outcome of peace talks was read as, in fact, biasing the talks — by seeming to endorse Israel’s continued presence in the West Bank.

Yousef Munayyer, executive director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, told me today the State Department’s statement “is a deliberate slap in the face of an international consensus on the need for Palestinian self-determination.”

He said Trump “must make clear to Israel that the status quo is unacceptable and that Palestinians should be afforded equal rights, if not a state, and that there is no in between.”

The problem for critics of both the American and Israeli administrations is that there’s no reason to believe that Trump would pressure a close ally like Netanyahu to do something the Israeli leader clearly doesn’t want to do.

Netanyahu has said this before. This time feels different

As the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz pointed out, this isn’t the first time Netanyahu has pledged to keep Israelis on West Bank land. In January 2014 he told Israel journalists, “I have no intention of evacuating any settlement or uprooting any Israeli.” In January 2013 he promised, “The days of bulldozers uprooting Jews are behind us, not ahead of us."

And Ha’aretz noted Tuesday that Netanyahu has recently been taking more speaking engagements in the West Bank and celebrating West Bank products and achievements.

In his speech Monday, he told the crowd that when Israel has uprooted settlements in the past, the country has not gotten peace in return, but instead has been hit by missiles. It was a reference to the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 and the subsequent years of conflict that have followed, including a war in 2014 that led to the deaths of over 2,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and 66 Israeli soldiers.

Natan Sachs of the Brookings Institution said that Monday night’s position was largely meant for domestic consumption and a nod to Netanyahu’s right-wing base. But ultimately, he said, it was consistent with the Israeli prime minister’s statements in the past.

“He thinks Jewish settlements in the West Bank would be no different than having Arab cities within Israel,” Sachs said.

Trump appears to agree, even if the rest of the world doesn’t.